Prosecution renews detention of journalist Ismail Alexandrani’s for fourth time

Cairo State Security Prosecution extended Monday the detention of investigative journalist and researcher Ismail Alexandrani for 15 more days pending investigations.

Alexandrani, 32, is accused of belonging to the banned Muslim Brotherhood group, spreading false information and rumours with the aim of terrorising people.

Alexandrani denied all the charges levelled against him, and stressed that all his publications, the latest of which were in September, are of a journalistic nature comprised solely of facts.

The prominent researcher was detained late November after the Egyptian embassy in Berlin issued a memorandum against him, according to his wife Khadeega Gaafar.

Alexandrani is being held at Cairo’s Tora Prison. He was arrested at the Hurghada airport upon his arrival from Berlin. He was then transferred to Cairo, where he was interrogated by Cairo State Security Prosecution.

Alexandrani was detained for 15 days pending investigations, before the pre-trial detention was renewed three consecutive times. The most recent renewal occurred on 11 January.

Gaafar posted on her Twitter account Monday that the next hearing will be on 27 January.

Following his arrest, solidarity campaigns and condemnations emerged, with a large number of international and local organisations calling for his release and criticising the government restrictions on journalists and opposition figures.

Seventy-four university scholars and researchers from various countries have also signed a petition demanding that the Egyptian authorities release Alexandrani.

Alexandrani has been working as a researcher at Paris-based Arab Reform Initiative since 2013 where his research focuses on the relation between state politics and paramilitary groups with a focus on the Egyptian state’s actions in Sinai. He won the Open Eye-Hany Darweesh Award in 2014.

Earlier this year, his chapter “Violence in Sinai: the State’s War on Society and Producing Terrorism” was published in the book “L’Égypte en revolutions” (Egypt in revolutions). His chapter “Citizenship between Neo-Islamism and Post-Islamism” appeared in collection of essays entitled “Islam, Citizenship and New Media”.